Slightly Engaged. Wendy Markham

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      If Jack wants to marry me, great.

      If not…

      Well, not great. But not the end of the world, either.

      Mental note: time to stop dwelling on getting engaged.

      This wanna-be-fiancée stuff is getting old. I need to toss my secret stash of bridal magazines and stop asking everyone—except Jack—why he hasn’t proposed yet.

      Not that I’m going to ask Jack, either.

      I’ll have more patience than…well, more patience than I had with Will, for whom I waited an entire summer.

      In vain, I might add.

      Chapter 6

      Speaking of Will, guess who calls me at work the Monday morning after the Sweetest Day when I don’t get engaged?

      Yes, Will McCraw, the man—and I use the term loosely—who left for summer stock and never came back. To me, that is. He did return to New York that fall, and he brought with him a souvenir—a blonde named Esme Spencer, with whom he said he had more in common than he did with me. Meaning, she was also a self-absorbed drama queen.

      I do not use “queen” loosely, despite the fact that I am apparently the only person in the tristate area who believes in Will’s heterosexuality.

      I should know, right? I slept with him for three years and can attest that not every good-looking, cologne-and-couture-wearing, narcissistic actor is gay.

      Then again, Will secretly being gay could make his lack of interest in me easier to bear. Not that I’m still pining away for him in the least. But when you’re as insecure as I used to be—and all right, still am in some ways—then you don’t easily get over not being desired by your own boyfriend.

      Nevertheless, I truly ninety-nine-point-nine percent believe that what Will McCraw is, aside from a self-absorbed drama queen and a cheating bastard, is a flaming metrosexual.

      What Tracey Spadolini is, according to said flaming metrosexual, is sadly bourgeois.

      You wanted somebody who would love you and marry you and settle down with you.

      That was Will’s breakup accusation, and in his opinion, the ultimate insult. It was also true then and still is, only now I’m not ashamed of it.

      My breakup accusation was, “You kept me around because I was as crazy about you as you are about yourself.”

      Also true, and a long time in coming.

      How I didn’t realize that from the start is beyond me. I guess I was so beyond insecure, so obsessed with being forty pounds overweight and a small-town hick masquerading as a city girl, that I was grateful just to have a boyfriend.

      When I think of how I lapped up the slightest attention from Will like melting chocolate ice cream on a ninety-degree day…

      Well, it makes me sicker than the ice cream would if it sat out in the sun for an entire ninety-degree day before I ate it.

      Will dumped Esme, as all my friends predicted he would, and came crawling back, as all my friends predicted he would, right around the time I met Jack.

      Maybe even because I met Jack, since Will certainly wasn’t interested in me when I was whiling away a solitary New York summer with only cabbage soup and Gulliver’s Travels for company.

      Fortunately, I was never the least bit tempted to hook up with Will again.

      All right, maybe I was tempted just once. The night Jack almost chose the Giants playoff game over me, I almost made a huge mistake.

      But he didn’t choose the game, and I didn’t choose Will, and Jack and I are living happily ever after—more or less—while Will the Flaming Metrosexual is still trying to become the next Mandy Patinkin.

      He calls often to update me on his progress.

      This morning, in response to my fake-jovial “Will! How the hell are you?” he jumps right in with, “Tracey, guess what?”

      Will is not the kind of person who requires much conversational feedback, so I don’t bother to guess. In fact, I don’t bother to stop checking my Monday-morning e-mail, which is what I was doing when the phone rang.

      “I’ve got an audition.”

      Yawn.

      “And it’s not stage this time. It’s for a film,” he adds quickly lest I erroneously assume it’s for a stool-softener commercial.

      “That’s great, Will.” So he’s given up on becoming the next Mandy Patinkin in favor of becoming the next Johnny Depp. Yeah, that’ll happen.

      I reach for my cigarettes before remembering that I can’t smoke here. Damn. I clutch the pack anyway, planning to make a beeline for an elevator to the street the second I’m done listening to Will spout gems like, “Trust me, Tracey—this role is so me.”

      “I trust you.” So there’s obviously an open casting call for a self-absorbed drama queen cheating bastard flaming metrosexual? Talk about typecasting.

      “I’m going to blow them away, Trace.”

      Trace, he calls me, because we’re just that cozy.

      “That’s awesome,” I say in a tone that might hint that awesome semi-rhymes with ho-hum.

      “I know!” he exclaims, too caught up in this revolutionary moment in the Life of Will to catch any hint of hohumness on my part. “If I don’t get this, I’ll be shocked.”

      “So will I,” I say blandly, scanning an e-mailed chain letter on the off chance that forwarding it to five hundred people in the next minute will shrink Will’s ego to the size of his—

      “It’s a romantic lead,” he tells me. “That’s my thing.”

      Yeah, not in my life.

      “The only thing that could really put a lock on the role for me would be if it involved singing.”

      “No singing?”

      “No, but I’ve got the acting skills to carry it, you know?”

      Naturally, he waits for me to confirm his well-rounded fabulousness. “Yeah, I know,” I say unenthusiastically.

      “Fifi told me just Thursday that I’m at the top of my game.”

      He’s talking about Fifi La Bouche, an eccentric Parisian choreographer friend of his. She’s about eighty and still looks great in a leotard. I know this because that’s what she’s wearing every time I’ve ever met her. She wears it everywhere, to lunch, to shop, to stroll—just a leotard under a trench coat, as if at any moment she might be asked to put together a jazzy chorus-line routine.

      “That’s great,” I murmur, finding it hard to believe СКАЧАТЬ